The United States has spent a record of at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since the war on Gaza began and led to escalating conflict around West Asia, according to a report for Brown University’s Costs of War project, released on Monday on the anniversary of Hamas’s attacks on Israel.

An additional $4.86 billion has gone into stepped-up U.S. military operations in the region since the October 7, 2023, attacks, researchers said. That included the costs of a Navy-led campaign to quell strikes on commercial shipping by Yemen’s Houthis, who are carrying them out in solidarity with the fellow Iranian-backed group Hamas.

The report — completed before Israel opened a second front — against Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, in late September — is one of the first tallies of estimated U.S. costs as the President Joe Biden’s administration backs Israel in its conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon and seeks to contain hostilities by Iran-allied armed groups in the region.

The financial toll is on top of the cost in human lives: Hamas militants killed more than 1,200 people in Israel a year ago and took 250 others hostage. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed nearly 42,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry.

At least 1,400 people in Lebanon, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, have been killed since Israel greatly expanded its strikes in that country in late September.

The financial costs were calculated by Linda J. Bilmes, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has assessed the full costs of U.S. wars since the September 11, 2001, attacks, and fellow researchers William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler.

Israel — a protege of the United States since its 1948 founding — is the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid in history, getting $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959, the report said.

Even so, the $17.9 billion spent since October 7, 2023, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is by far the most military aid sent to Israel in one year. The U.S. committed to providing billions in military assistance to Israel and Egypt each year when they signed their 1979 U.S.-brokered peace treaty, and an agreement since the Obama administration set the annual amount for Israel at $3.8 billion through 2028.

The U.S. aid since the Gaza war started includes military financing, arms sales, at least $4.4 billion in drawdowns from U.S. stockpiles and hand-me-downs of used equipment.

Much of the U.S. weapons delivered in the year were munitions, from artillery shells to 2,000-pound bunker-busters and precision-guided bombs.

Expenditures range from $4 billion to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defence systems to cash for rifles and jet fuel, the study said.

Unlike the U.S.’s publicly documented military aid to Ukraine, it was impossible to get the full details of what the U.S. has shipped Israel since last October 7, so the $17.9 billion for the year is a partial figure, the researchers said.

They cited Biden administration “efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering.”

‘Divided’ society

Funding for the key U.S. ally during a war that has exacted a heavy toll on civilians has divided Americans during the ongoing presidential campaign.

But support for Israel has long carried weight in U.S. politics, and Mr. Biden said on Friday that “no administration has helped Israel more than I have.”

The Biden administration has bolstered its military strength in the region since the war in Gaza started, aiming at deterring and responding to any attacks on Israeli and American forces.

Those additional operations cost at least $4.86 billion, the report said, not including beefed-up U.S. military aid to Egypt and other partners in the region. U.S.

The U.S. had 34,000 forces in West Asia the day that Hamas broke through Israeli barricades around Gaza to attack. That number rose to about 50,000 in August when two aircraft carriers were in the region, aiming at discouraging retaliation after a strike attributed to Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. The total is now around 43,000.

The number of U.S. vessels and aircraft deployed — aircraft carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group, fighter squadrons, and air defence batteries — in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden has varied during the year.

The Pentagon has said another aircraft carrier strike group is headed to Europe very soon and that could increase the troop total again if two carriers are again in the region at the same time.

The U.S. military has deployed since the start of the war to try to counter escalated strikes by the Houthis, an armed faction that controls Yemen’s capital and northern areas. The researchers called the $4.86 billion cost to the U.S. an “unexpectedly complicated and asymmetrically expensive challenge.”

Houthis have kept launching attacks on ships traversing the critical trade route, drawing U.S. strikes on launch sites and other targets.

The campaign has become the most intense running sea battle the U.S. Navy has faced since the Second World War.

“The U.S. has deployed multiple aircraft carriers, destroyers, cruisers and expensive multimillion-dollar missiles against cheap Iranian-made Houthi drones that cost $2,000,” the authors said.

The researchers’ calculations included at least $55 million in additional combat pay from the intensified operations in the region.

U.S. President Joe Biden.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

The Biden administration has told key lawmakers it would send more than $1 billion in additional arms and ammunition to Israel, three congressional aides said on May 15. But it was not immediately known how soon the weapons would be delivered.

It’s the first arms shipment to Israel to be revealed since the administration put another arms transfer, consisting of 3,500 bombs of up to 2,000 pounds each, on hold this month. The Biden administration, citing concern for civilian casualties in Gaza, has said it paused that bomb transfer to keep Israel from using those particular munitions in its offensive in the crowded southern Gaza city of Rafah.

The package disclosed on May 15 includes about $700 million for tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles and $60 million in mortar rounds, the congressional aides said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an arms transfer that has not yet been made public.

There was no immediate indication of when the arms would be sent. Two congressional aides said the shipment is not part of the long-delayed foreign aid package that Congress passed and Biden signed last month. It wasn’t known if the shipment was the latest tranche from an existing arms sale or something new.

The Biden administration has come under criticism from both sides of the political spectrum over its military support for Israel’s now seven-month-old war against Hamas in Gaza — at a time when Biden is battling for reelection against former President Donald Trump.

Some of Mr. Biden’s fellow Democrats have pushed him to limit transfers of offensive weapons to Israel to pressure the U.S. ally to do more to protect Palestinian civilians. Protests on college campuses around the U.S. have driven home the message this spring.

Republican lawmakers have seized on the administration’s pause on the bomb transfers, saying any lessening of U.S. support for Israel — its closest ally in the Middle East — weakens that country as it fights Hamas and other Iran-backed groups. In the House, they are planning to advance a bill this week to mandate the delivery of offensive weaponry for Israel.

Despite the one-time suspension of a bomb shipment, Mr. Biden and administration officials have made clear they will continue other weapons deliveries and overall military support to Israel, which is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid.

Mr. Biden will see to it that “Israel has all of the military means it needs to defend itself against all of its enemies, including Hamas,” national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters on May 13. “For him, this is very straightforward: He’s going to continue to provide Israel with all of the capabilities it needs, but he does not want certain categories of American weapons used in a particular type of operation in a particular place. And again, he has been clear and consistent with that.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported the plans for the $1 billion weapons package to Israel.

In response to House Republicans’ plan to move forward with a bill to mandate the delivery of offensive weapons for Israel, the White House said on May 14 that Mr. Biden would veto the bill if it were to pass Congress.

The bill has practically no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate. But House Democrats are somewhat divided on the issue, and roughly two dozen have signed onto a letter to the Biden administration saying they were “deeply concerned about the message” sent by pausing the bomb shipment.

One of the letter’s signers, New York Rep. Ritchie Torres, said he would likely vote for the bill, despite the White House’s opposition.

“I have a general rule of supporting pro-Israel legislation unless it includes a poison pill — like cuts to domestic policy,” he said.

In addition to the written veto threat, the White House has been in touch with various lawmakers and congressional aides about the legislation, according to an administration official.

“We strongly, strongly oppose attempts to constrain the President’s ability to deploy U.S. security assistance consistent with U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this week, adding that the administration plans to spend “every last cent” appropriated by Congress in the national security supplemental package that was signed into law by Mr. Biden last month.